Jira Plans Review: The Good, The Bad, and The "Individual" Gap

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So, you’ve mastered the single-project board. You’re moving tickets from "To-Do" to "Done". But then, your boss walks in and asks for a "high-level roadmap" across five different projects. Or worse, she wants to know if your team actually has the capacity to take on that new feature next month.

If you’re relying on basic Jira, this is the part where you start opening twenty different tabs and crying into your coffee.

Naturally, you start looking for an upgrade. The native answer from Atlassian is Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps). It’s a powerful tool, but is it the right tool for you? Let’s break it down, look at the pros and cons, and discuss why it might leave you hanging on resource management.

What is Jira Plans?

Jira Plans is Atlassian’s answer to the "Big Picture" problem. Available in the Premium and Enterprise editions of Jira Software, it sits above your standard boards and aggregates data. It takes issues from multiple boards, projects, filters, and visualizes them on a single timeline.

Key features you get:

• Cross-project visibility & dependencies
  You can track work across multiple teams and projects in one view. More importantly, dependencies are flagged early on, allowing you to see how a delay in Team A will impact Team B before it becomes a crisis.
• Capacity management
  This feature helps you balance deliverables against your actual team bandwidth. By assigning work based on capacity and timeframes, you can generate a realistic schedule that sets the right expectations with your stakeholders (rather than just guessing).
• Expandable issue hierarchy
  Basic Jira hierarchies (Epic > Story) can be limiting. Plans allow you to create custom levels above Epics, letting you visualize the full relationships of your work—from high-level quarterly goals all the way down to daily tasks.
• Scenario planning
  Need to experiment? Scenarios let you explore alternative paths, such as "Best Case" vs. "Worst Case." This allows you to quickly assess downstream impacts and tradeoffs in a sandbox environment before committing any changes to the live project.

Who needs it?

While Jira Plans is likely overkill for a single team working off a simple backlog, it becomes essential for those managing complexity at scale. It is designed specifically for Product Directors who need expandable hierarchies to trace quarterly goals down to execution, Program Managers who must visualize cross-project dependencies to prevent bottlenecks, and Delivery Leads who rely on scenario planning and capacity data to manage stakeholder expectations. 

Essentially, if you need to move beyond simple task tracking and prove—with data—how strategic initiatives, potential risks, and resource constraints interact across your entire portfolio, this is the tool for you.

The resource management "blind spot"

So, credit where credit is due: for strategic roadmapping, it works.

But for the Project Manager trying to manage actual humans? It has some holes. Big ones.

Resource management is the dealbreaker for many PMs. But remember, Jira Plans works on the concept of Team Capacity, not individual capacity.

Here is why that’s bad:

Let’s say you have a team of 5 developers. Specifically, 1 Senior Dev and 4 Junior Devs.
Jira Plans looks at the "Team" and says: "Great! You have 200 hours of capacity this sprint."

You assign a complex feature that requires 60 hours of Senior work.
The system says: "Green light! You have plenty of capacity!"

The Reality: Your Senior Dev is now overloaded by 150%, while your Juniors are sitting idle because they can't handle that specific task. Jira Plans doesn’t see individuals easily. It sees a bucket of hours.

As a PM, you don’t manage "buckets." You manage people. You need to know if Karen is overloaded, not if "Team Alpha" is theoretically okay on average.

The all-in-one alternative

If the "Senior Dev" scenario above gave you a mild panic attack, you are not alone. This gap between Team Capacity and Individual Reality is exactly why many Project Managers look to the Atlassian Marketplace.

And this is where Planyway comes in.

While Jira Plans is excellent for the high-level portfolio view, Planyway is designed to handle the ground-level reality of project management. It solves the individual capacity problem without forcing you to sacrifice the big-picture roadmap.

Here is how it fills the gap:

➡️True individual capacity planning. Instead of a generic "Team" bucket, Planyway visualizes workload by user. You get a timeline view showing exactly who is doing what. If a team member is allocated more than 8 hours a day, their bar turns red.

To fix it, you don’t need to recalibrate a global algorithm. You simply stretch the issue for longer, drag and drop the task to someone else or shift it to next week. The app lets you schedule different capacity schemes and takes vacations and days-off into account. 

➡️You don’t lose the roadmap. Planyway also includes a robust Roadmap view that respects your Jira hierarchy (Epics > Stories > Sub-tasks). You can still visualize your long-term project timeline across projects, manage dependencies, and group tasks by Epic, Project, Team, User and Component — even more options than in Jira Plans.

➡️Time tracking & reporting

Unlike Jira Plans, Planyway includes native Time Tracking and Reporting.

• The Plan: you allocate 10 hours for a task.
• The Reality: your developer logs 12 hours using the Planyway timer or timesheet.
• The Report: you can instantly pull a report comparing "Planned vs. Actual" effort.

This feedback loop is critical. It helps you improve your future estimations and gives you hard data when negotiating budgets and deadlines with stakeholders.

The verdict

If you are a massive enterprise trying to automate roadmaps across 500 disjointed teams, Jira Plans is the standard. It’s built for the enterprise view.

However, if you are a Project Manager who needs to deliver projects on time while actually managing your team's workload and budget, the native tool might feel a bit detached from reality.

You need granularity. You need to see who is doing what.

Planyway offers a powerful alternative by unifying the three pillars of project management—Roadmapping, Resource Management, and Time Tracking—into a single view. It gives you the visibility to impress your stakeholders, but keeps the granular tools you need to keep your team on track.